Dr who BBC eighth doctor 52 mad dogs and englishmen paul magrs

THIS IS THE 100TH NOVEL IN THE RECORD-BREAKING BBC WORLDWIDE DOCTOR WHO SERIES
‘Grrrrr.’
The greatest book ever written.
Professor Reginald Tyler’s The True History of Planets was a
twentieth-century classic; an epic of dwarves and swords and
wizardry. And definitely no poodles. Or at least there weren’t
when the Doctor read it.
Now it tells the true tale of how the Queen of the poodles was
overthrown; it’s been made into a hit movie, and it’s going to cause
a bloodbath on the Dogworld – unless the Doctor, Fitz and Anji
(and assorted friends) can sort it all out.
The Doctor infiltrates the Smudgelings, Tyler’s elite Cambridge
writing set of the early twentieth century; Fitz falls for flamboyant
torch singer Brenda Soobie in sixties Las Vegas, and Anji
experiences some very special effects in seventies Hollywood.
Their intention is to prevent the movie from ever being made. But
there is a shadowy figure present in all three time zones who is
just as determined to see it completed. . . so the poodle revolution
can begin.
This is another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth
Doctor.



MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN
PAUL MAGRS


Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd
Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT
First published 2002
Copyright c Paul Magrs 2002
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Original series broadcast on the BBC
Format c BBC 1963
Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
ISBN 0 563 53845 7
Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright c BBC 2002
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of
Chatham
printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton


With thanks to:
Joy Foster, Louise Foster, Mark Magrs, Charles Foster, Gladys Johnston, Michael
Fox, Nicola Creegan, Lynne Heritage, Pete Courtie, Brigid Robinson, Jon
Rolfe, Antonia Rolfe, Steve Jackson, Laura Wood, Alicia Stubbersfield, Sid
Hansen, Paul Cornell, Bill Penson, Mark Walton, Sara Maitland, Meg Davis,
Amanda Reynolds, Lucie Scott, Richard Klein, Reuben Lane, Kenneth MacGowan, Georgina Hammick, Maureen Duffy, Shena Mackay, Vic Sage, Lorna
Sage, Sharon Sage, Rupert Hodson, Marina Mackay, Jayne Morgan, Val Striker,
Andrew Motion, Louise D’Arcens, Malcolm Bradbury, Steve Cole, Jac Rayner,
Justin Richards, James Friel, Andrew Biswell, Gary Russell, Kate Orman, Jon
Blum, Neil Smith, Patrick Gale, Patricia Duncker, Russell T Davies, Stewart
Sheargold, Stephen Hornby, Jo Moses, Graeme Vaughan, Sarah Churchwell,
David Shelley, Bridget O‘Connor, Peter Straughan, Tiffany Murray and Larry,
Julia Darling, Roz Kaveney, Carol Ann Johnson and Jeremy Hoad.


Contents

Chapter One

6

Chapter Two

12

Chapter Three

19

Chapter Four

23

Chapter Five

31

Chapter Six

38

Chapter Seven

44

Chapter Eight

50

Chapter Nine

56

Chapter Ten

62

Chapter Eleven

67

Chapter Twelve

71

Chapter Thirteen

80

Chapter Fourteen

86

Chapter Fifteen

92

Chapter Sixteen

98

4


5
Chapter Seventeen

104

Chapter Eighteen

109

Chapter Nineteen

115

Chapter Twenty

121

Chapter Twenty-one

125

Chapter Twenty-two

131

Chapter Twenty-three

138

Chapter Twenty-four

144

Chapter Twenty-five

151

Chapter Twenty-six

156

Chapter Twenty-seven

161

Chapter Twenty-eight

167

Chapter Twenty-nine

172

Chapter Thirty

177

Chapter Thirty-one

182

Chapter Thirty-two

186

Chapter Thirty-three

201

Chapter Thirty-four

207

About the Author

208


Chapter One
Reginald Tyler began writing the book that would become The True History of
Planets in 1917, in bed, whilst on leave from soldiering in France.
While in that hospital in north Yorkshire his nerves were shattered and his
mind was shaky and febrile. From the uncertain froth of his various hypnagogic

states, commingled with the product of his extensive studies in linguistics and
mythology, he dreamed up one of the most curious books that the century
would produce.
He was somewhere near Whitby, apparently. It was a town that had already
inspired the writing of alarming books. In the last century, one man had holidayed there and had written of a black-hearted, bloodlusting devil who arrived
from the churning sea in a wooden box and who, with his silvered tongue
and his ferociously pointed teeth, had enslaved the young girls he met on the
Prom. Another had visited there and had written of a feisty young madam who
voyaged to a Wonderland – or at least, an amoral, absurdist hell of her own
making.
The stiff, salty air of the seaside town was still, in 1917, thick with lurid
imaginings and the young Reginald (not yet the esteemed Professor he was to
become) was ripe for inspiration.
Gulls wheeled and scrummed for fish heads and scraps.
The sea foam crashed on wet, black rocks.
And the twentieth century grumbled its inexorable way forth: its commotion
persistent as the sound of gunfire from across the sea.
Reg was a skinny and sickly, gentle but impatient soul and, already, at this
tender age, he could speak a forbidding number of languages; alive, dead and
of his own invention.
Often he would wake from a stupor and babble at nurses. Some say that he
could even talk to the animals, though he was better with domestic pets than
anything too exotic.
He was, in short, a brilliant, inventive person, damaged by war and destined
to write a biggie.


Chapter One

7

That much is clear.
The True History of Planets was begun in those teenage years of the century, and
it was the book he laboured at for much of the ensuing decades. He worked on
it laboriously, after the First War and then through the second, by which time
he was an esteemed college professor, at one of the oldest universities.
There was never enough time for Reg. Never enough hours in the day, nor
days in the year, or years in the century.
His opus grew slowly and he grew old with it. Selfishly and slavishly he kept
it to himself, sharing its shadowy, learned bulk only with a number of his most
valued colleagues and fellow scribblers, during the thirties and forties.
This society of writers, based around his college, gathering once a week to
discuss and to read aloud their works in progress was known, rather jovially
amongst themselves, as the Smudgelings. All of them were convinced of the
greatness and the seriousness of Reg’s massive book.
It was a book he was working on till the day he died.
This was much later, in the early nineteen-seventies, by which time he was
long retired, much fˆeted as a scholar, and still shackled to his immense imaginative work.
At the end of his life, Reg had left his ancient university town and had moved
south, to live by the sea again, in Bournemouth. This was to appease his longsuffering wife, Enid, who dearly wished to live in a bungalow by the sea and
no longer in a damp, clammy university town.
Enid had stuck loyally by him during his years as a professor, though she
despised the academic life. It had been she who, as a nurse, had coaxed him
through that nervous illness of 1917. She stayed with him because she loved
him, though hers was not a happy life.
When he died in 1974, it was Enid who at last went into Tyler’s makeshift
study in the bungalow’s garage to sort out his affairs. She was the one who had
hoiked out the dusty manuscript of the ongoing book and promptly sold it for
a bomb.
One that set off reverberations everywhere.

Up and down the length of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on Earth,
and other worlds besides.
Notably the dogworld.
Not that the doughty Mrs Tyler cared.
She had always considered Reg too precious with his novel. The agents and
publishers she consulted during her early widowhood all told her that it was a


8

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

masterpiece and would see her through her twilight years in some comfort.
She herself couldn’t make head nor tail of the strange book. But then, Enid
had never had much idea about the obstruse and arcane things her gruff husband had banged on about through their decades together.
As far as Enid was concerned, they should have cashed in on this book much,
much sooner. With Reg gone, she was free, suddenly, to publish it in a hundred
different languages if she so chose. She would let them adapt it for television,
radio, even the movies. It could become a comic strip, a West End musical, for
all she cared. They could bloody well perform it on ice, if they wanted.
Just so long as Enid got the cash.
With the cash in her hand, she could move to Jamaica at last.
Into the arms of her long-beloved.
Mrs Reg Tyler had very few qualms about finding a way to be with her secret
lover. She had sacrificed enough of her life to her husband’s pursuit of his
dream. For too long she had lived in the shadow of this erudite but inattentive
man.
And her lover had waited, through the years, for her to come to him, in
Jamaica.
Now she had to flog Tyler for all he was worth, to a world that had grown

up to share his delusions and his passion for other worlds, further dimensions,
strange beings on dangerous quests.
But before we get caught up in Enid Tyler’s flight to Jamaica and the arms of
her mystery lover (because that is a story for another day) let us return to the
last day or so of old Professor Tyler’s life, in 1974. Let us begin to unpick some
of the mystery that surrounds his famous work.
Because there are many mysteries.
Not least the one about the manuscript itself.
Namely: was the book that was published and later made extremely famous,
on this world and others, the one that old man Tyler had actually set out to
write?
All that work and all those years, quietly going about his heart’s desire.
Had someone tampered with the final result?
Had someone been secretly buggering him about?
Reg had always worked in language.
He worked inside language, his longest-running co-mythologiser and Christian fellow don, Cleavis, said. Tyler went back to the roots of Middle English


Chapter One

9

and Mid-Icelandic. He tried to construct a mythology for Britain such as the
Findlanders have. Trolls and lizards and people called things like Frigga.
There was nothing better Reg Tyler liked to have than all the chaps together
around the fire with their whiskies, translating line by line some gory tale from
a thousand years ago. Something invoking gods and thunderbolts, shafts of
wit, flights of rhetoric.
And not a single woman in sight. No distracting floozies.
Just good old, hard old erudition. Old college empiricism.

The novel he wrote was complicated and long, of course.
Eventually, everybody in the world would read it. Of this he was somehow
sure. So it was a thing worth doing right, and that took time.
As he wrote the novel though, he also had to write a much longer book to
complement it. This was the appendix to his book. It was a taxonomy of the
imagination that had fuelled this single novel. It was the critical component,
more than fifty years in the making. It was the book that was, to him, the Key
to All Mythologies, especially those of his own making.
He was dwarfed by his endless project.
When he retired, while his dear wife Enid at last lived her second girlhood in
Bournemouth he would labour in their converted garage on all the old papers
he had kept about him for years. While Enid gallivanted in taxis from the
front door of their modest bungalow to the hotel Miramar (a pink, art deco
monstrosity brimming with the ancient and the well-to-do), Reg was at home,
scratching his self-made alphabets on to the backs of old college exam papers.
He was wanting, somehow, to make up enough evidence for his long-running
fiction to seem more real.
‘Reg,’ said his wife a little tipsily, when she returned one evening, ‘They were
talking tonight, all that crowd, about your book.’
Enid plonked herself on the nicked antimacassar on the arm of his chair.
He scowled and lit his pipe, inching away from her, and closer to the gas fire,
which was giving him a headache.
His wife had two high spots of pink on her cheeks, as if she had been drinking
heavily while she’d been out with her usual Tuesday night crowd.
‘They were talking all about you, as a matter of fact.’
He looked, and saw that she was even proud of him.
When Enid had first got herself in with that well off, lowbrow set at the hotel
Miramar, she had been worried that she wouldn’t fit in. She had spent fifty
years as the wife of a shabby don and hiding her light under a bushel, and so

10

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

where was she then, in society? Precisely nowhere. Certainly not in the swing
of things anymore.
But she was the wife of an acclaimed academic scholar; one rumoured to
have been writing a great novel for almost sixty years.
Only two chapters had seen the light of day and been published. They had
come out as strange, baroque short stories in magazines in the nineteen-fifties.
They had been seized upon by an eager reading public and the rumour had it
that there was a great deal more to come from Professor Tyler.
Enid had been as cross and impatient as the rest of the world for her esteemed husband to deliver. Though, in her case, it wasn’t literature she was
thinking about. Enid was in her second youth at last, and the first thing on her
mind was the cash.
‘Let them go to the Underworld and rot!’ Reg would cry. ‘Let them go to the
Diamond Mines of Marion! The Third Ring of the Netherscope! All of them are
like. . . vultures! Peck peck pecking at my great work!’
‘Be fair,’ Enid would sigh. ‘You did rather whet everyone’s appetite with those
excerpts. You should be glad of the attention!’
This last comment, whenever it recurred, was never without a barbed glance
at him.
Reg would snort and stump back to his garage.
Sometimes Enid worried that Reg spent his time in that freezing, makeshift
office twiddling his gnarled thumbs or reading seed catalogues. The True History of Planets was just a sham, perhaps; a farrago of lies with which he had
hoodwinked the whole world, including her.
Like Bluebeard’s wife, Enid was forbidden to enter his hidden sanctum while
he yet lived.
And, oddly enough, she still feared the old man’s wrath enough not to try.

Instead, she resigned herself to waiting, and to flinging herself into the wild,
sherry-fuelled excitements of the Hotel Miramar and her new circle of friends.
Enid had found, upon moving here, that because of her husband’s infamy as a
literary oddity and a sought-after recluse, the well-to-do crowd at the Miramar
welcomed her with open arms. Only sometimes they would enquire after Reg
– who never accompanied his wife on her nights out – and they would ask
respectfully after the progress of his great book.
‘They were asking me all manner of strange questions about your work.’ She
giggled nervously and cuffed him as he scowled. ‘About maps and places with
the funniest names. They were talking like it was all true! It turns out they
were all quite knowledgeable about it all. And I was so embarrassed! Because,


Chapter One

11

I had to say, I haven’t even read those two stories of yours! Ever! The only
public fragments of Reg’s great opus and I haven’t even flicked through them!
And then, I had to laugh, because they looked so offended by that. I laughed
because they took it all so seriously. Like something that had really happened!
The wars and the adventures and the magic and so forth, all the things you
apparently allude to. I ended up talking to a couple who didn’t know what all
the fuss was about, either. A couple who didn’t know you from Adam. Really, I
felt quite alienated from all this talk of my own husband!’
Reg bridled at this information. None of that lot knew who he was. Not
really. They were just pecking at him.
None of them knew anything about it.
They probably thought of him as a grizzled old wizard.
A wizard in his converted garage in Bournemouth.

Scratching away in pen and ink. Scratching runes that no one but him could
read. Hypostasising his world, cementing it further, fully into place.
What did that vulgar lot down at the Hotel Miramar know?
Now he resented even having published the two fragments, if this was the
kind of impertinence he received as thanks.
‘Shall I invite some of them around for drinks one evening?’ Enid asked.
‘Hmm? Shall I ask them round so they can get a look at you?’
Of course, Enid was keen to show off the bungalow and the way she’d had
it done up inside. All mod cons. She would love to have good company round
here to cheer the place up. She wanted to see her new friends crowding around
her retired old man.
But Reg had no desire to see them. That gin-slinging, golf-playing crowd
from the hotel lounge.
Tarts, he thought. Tarts and finks and nancies.
That was the sort of person his wife was knocking about with these days.
And they were all talking about him, slugging back their cocktails at the
Hotel Miramar. Surf pounding on the beach and the traffic sludging by.
Late nights on Tuesdays and happy hour after hour after hour. . .


Chapter Two
In another hotel, one hundred years later and off-world, a conference was underway.
The hotel was built into a small, rather tatty-looking asteroid and it was,
for one weekend, playing host to an academic conference and a motley collection of academics, all of them concerned with Terran Science Fiction of the
Twentieth Century.
It was to be a very fraught weekend.
In the hotel foyer, there were all the usual conversations going on.
Delegates sat on sofas and drank odd-looking concoctions as they chewed
over the day’s panels and papers.
It was the second night of the conference and, by now, tongues were loosening, new friendships and alliances being forged. Old animosities were, of

course, happily flaring up anew.
The long, stringy creature who had this morning given a pleasant, if unchallenging paper on the early short stories of Philip K Dick, was slumped in
an armchair, gazing blankly into his foaming cocktail as his tiny companion
droned on.
Perched on the coffee table, his tiny companion was an insect with fractious,
silver eyes that were glaring about meanly as their owner ranted.
The insect was called Professor Alid Jag and his long, stringy friend was
Doctor Stellus Pontin.
They hailed from rival institutions, light years apart, but they had found
themselves thrown together again and again at affairs like this, because they
worked in the same area of literary research.
Sometimes Stellus Pontin, the long, stringy, glazed-looking creature, wished
that he had chosen a rather less fertile, perhaps more sedate, furrow to plough.
This evening his insect friend was being particularly shrill.
‘It is the temerity of it that I can’t understand,’ Alid Jag was saying. ‘How
someone, sitting at home on that planet in the middle of that hectic century,
could even have thoughts about attempting such a thing. To start to believe


Chapter Two

13

that they could imagine or have any inkling about. . . ’ Alid Jag gave out a tinny,
rattling cackle. ‘Well. . . about life on other planets. . . ’
‘Hmm,’ said his stringy companion.
‘It was, when you think about it, a very dubious preoccupation. What was
wrong with their own world, that they had to start poking their noses elsewhere?’
Stellus sighed. ‘Well, you can see.’
He gestured meaningfully around at the patterned wallpaper and the potted

palms. Their whole hotel had been decorated in imitation of some seaside joint
in the mid-twentieth century. For the duration of the conference they were
supposed to be pretending they were somewhere called Bournemouth. ‘The
place was so bleak,’ Stellus Pontin said. ‘Of course they made up other, more
outrageous places, in order to cheer themselves.’
His insect colleague was growing quite animated. ‘They were forever dreaming up other societies, other dimensions, other ways of doing things. It’s sickening.’
‘Anyone would think you despised the genre you work in,’ Stellus smiled. It
was well known that the resolutely pragmatic people of Alid Jag’s world – they
were tantamount to aphids – had little or no truck with the purely imaginative
or the metaphysical. Really, it was a wonder that the small professor had chosen
such a specialism as he had.
‘It is good to look keenly at what sickens us,’ declared Alid Jag. ‘It is good to
gaze into our worst horrors.’
‘Really? Why?’
This flummoxed the aphid for a moment.
The long, stringy Stellus went on. ‘I, on the other hand, adore all of it.
Just give me the most improbable story that anyone on that benighted rock
ever thought up and I will be as happy as anything. Make it as ludicrous and
incredible as possible. Why, even make it so it doesn’t even make sense, and I’ll
be delighted!’
The insect creature rolled his silver eyes witheringly. ‘You’re far too credulous
to be a proper critic, you know. You have to learn to despise what you analyse.
Everyone knows that. Before you can know what anything is about, it really
has to stick in your craw.’
They had had this argument before.
‘I know,’ said Stellus fondly. ‘And that’s why I’ll never get on in my work. I’m
too wilfully accepting and delighted by the trash dished out of the decadent
Terran subconscious, out of a bastardised genre in a depraved era.’

14

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

‘Exactly,’ said the insect creature firmly and smugly. ‘A too willing desire to
be felled by the ridiculous, that’s your tragedy. And it will be your downfall,
ultimately, in my opinion.’
And with that, the TARDIS materialised, rather noisily, in the exact spot that
their coffee table had been occupying.
There was a horrible crunch of wickerwork and a tinkle of smoked glass and
crockery, still audible beneath the elephantine, transdimensional hullaballoo
set up by the arrival of the Police Box.
Stellus jerked up in his seat, appalled, as the tall blue box solidified in front
of him and the light on its roof stopped flashing.
His very next thought was of the fate of his learned colleague and sparring
partner, who had been sitting amongst the tea cups and plates on the coffee
table.
‘Professor Jag!’ he shrieked, jumping up.
But there was no reply. The blue box itself was impassive and still.
On long, pale, trembling legs, Stellus Pontin hurried across to reception to
alert the desk clerk.
The desk clerk’s eyes went wide as the stringy being stammered out his tale.
The desk clerk stubbed out her cigarette and bellowed at someone called
Francine in the office to mind the front desk. ‘Can’t leave it unattended,’ she
explained, tottering round the counter on the marble flooring. ‘Not with a
horde of scholars running about the place. They’re notorious for thieving.’
‘Quickly,’ Stellus Pontin insisted. ‘I think the esteemed Professor Jag may be
in considerable agony. . . ’
The desk clerk led the way breezily to the bar area, flicking her hair and
snapping gum. ‘What was it you said had happened to him? A box, was it you

said? Some kind of box fell on him?’
They hurried up the few short steps to the bar, where a few other of the
evening drinkers were staring in some concern at the strange, new, stationary
arrival.
‘Goodness,’ said the receptionist whose name badge, Stellus Pontin now saw,
identified her as Ellie. ‘That is a big box, and no mistake. And you say your
little friend is trapped underneath it?’
Stellus Pontin nodded dumbly and felt his eyes begin to fill with tears. Alid
Jag had been a scholarly thorn in his skinny side for years, true enough. But
Stellus Pontin would miss seeing the little fella at gatherings and jamborees
like this.


Chapter Two

15

There was simply no way, Stellus Pontin realised, that the Professor could
have survived, squashed flat under a box like that.
Ellie the desk clerk was getting herself quite worked up.
‘Where did it come from? I assure you, sir, that this hotel isn’t usually a place
where we drop large, heavy objects on our guests, squashing them painfully to
their deaths as they enjoy a quiet drink in the luxurious setting of the Hawaiian
bar.’
‘It happened!’ Stellus Pontin cried. ‘I saw it with my own eyes!’
Several other academics were clustering around the agitated desk clerk,
recognising that she was in charge. A being composed entirely of russetcoloured rock and a rather hairy colleague had lumbered up with their drinks
still in their hands.
‘It’s true,’ said the silicon-based person. ‘We saw it too. Professor Alid Jag
was talking away happily one minute, as was his wont. . . then, the next minute

– bang!’
His hirsute friend blinked thoughtfully under his fringe. ‘There was a ghastly
vworp-vworping noise.’
‘This is murder,’ gasped Ellie the receptionist, chewing her fingers.
‘If it is, it’s not very subtle,’ said Stellus Pontin. ‘Let’s face it, if someone really
wanted to get rid of Alid Jag, all you’d have to do is tread on him and grind him
into the carpet. You wouldn’t need an object of this size.’ He stared up at the
sides of the implacable blue box. He reached out one thin hand and realised
that the thing was humming. And the others were looking at him strangely.
‘I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘if you really wanted to find a quick, easy way to
assassinate an esteemed academic of his modest dimensions. Not that I ever
thought about it.’ He coughed.
Ellie had a bright idea. ‘I’ll give Mr Brewster, the manager, a ring.’
The rock creature shook his craggy head. ‘There’s bound to be pandemonium. Blue boxes dropping on conference attendees. And on only the second
day!’
The lavishly coifed gentleman said, ‘I was rather hoping Professor Jag might
come to my paper on the prevalence of goat motifs in multi-volume quest sagas
of the nineteen-eighties. It hardly seems worth giving it at all now. The heart
and soul has gone out of our discipline. . . ’
Just then the wooden doors of the Police Box rattled and flew open.
A head appeared in the dark gap, tousle-haired and bearded. Steady blue
eyes gazed at them all and the assorted onlookers blinked in amazement.
‘Hullo,’ said the Doctor. ‘I do hope we’re not too late?’


16

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Ellie found herself replying, ‘Too late for what, sir?’

He beamed at her. ‘To hear Professor Jag’s paper on the epistemological anomalies in the work of the early twentieth-century mystery writer, Fox
Soames. I found the conference brochure stuffed into an old pair of waterproof
waders while I was having a tidy round the boot cupboard. Well?’
Ellie was jabbing at the buttons of a slim, but slow, communications device.
‘Well what, sir?’
‘Have I missed it? I’m very interested in the anomalous novels of Fox Soames.
I think he was perhaps up to no good, if you get my drift.’
Ellie was speaking into her device now, having got through to the manager.
‘I think you’d better come down to the Hawaiian bar,’ she said, somewhat
breathily.
‘Oh, don’t go to any bother for us,’ the Doctor smiled.
‘Us?’ said Stellus Pontin, quivering. ‘Just how many of you are there inside
that awful thing?’
The Doctor stared at him as if he hadn’t noticed him before. ‘There’s myself,
of course, and there’s Fitz and there’s Anji. Those two are rather slow off the
mark this morning, I’m afraid. I think maybe the novelty of new times, new
places, might have worn off slightly with them. They send me out first to see
what it’s like, like a sheep down a poisoned treacle well! Or whatever it is they
send sheep into. . . ’
‘There are three of them in there!’ Stellus Pontin gasped to the other delegates.
‘Three murderers!’ said the silicon-based scholar.
‘Murderers?’ said the Doctor. ‘Oh no. Not one of those affairs. Are you
saying that no sooner have we arrived than we’re being mistakenly arrested for
murder? Do you realise how often people make that mistake?’
‘It’s no mistake,’ shrilled Stellus Pontin. ‘I saw it happen with my own eyes.’
‘Really?’
Triumphantly Ellie the receptionist snapped off her communicator and said,
‘The manager is on his way.’
‘Your terrible blue box squashed Professor Alid Jag flat, right in front of me,’
snapped Stellus Pontin. ‘You won’t get to hear him deliver his paper because

you yourself have pulverised the poor fella.’
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor with a long face. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite.’
‘I think we should leave all the questions until Mr Brewster gets here,’ said
Ellie. ‘He will know what to do. He always does.’


Chapter Two

17

‘I’d like a title like “manager”,’ said the Doctor, glumly. ‘Something to make
me sound in control and competent. “Doctor” just sounds like someone who
meddles and stitches things up.’ He sighed and brushed down his blue velvet
jacket, as if preparing to meet someone important. Then he banged his fist on
the open TARDIS door. ‘Anji! Fitz! You’d better come out! We’re up to our
necks in it already!’
The others watched, warily, as two further interlopers stepped out of the
terrible box into the muted hush of the Hawaiian bar. The first was a skinny
young man in a trench coat and T-shirt, his hair fluffed as if he’d been sleeping
on it. He hadn’t shaved and he was rubbing crossly at his eyes.
‘What do you mean “already”? We haven’t even stepped over the. . . oh.’
He looked at them all and seemed to give in, his thin shoulders slumping. He
glanced ruefully at the Doctor. ‘Record for you this, Doctor.’
The Doctor gave him a half-hearted smile. ‘They seem to think I’ve squashed
the very person I brought us here to see.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘It’s never happened before,’ said the Doctor. ‘But he was very small, by all
accounts.’
‘Jesus,’ muttered Fitz.

Anji emerged behind them, wearing a dark jacket and trousers, with her hair
tied up, ready for anything. She stared at them all blankly. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a bit of a bungle, I’m afraid, Anji,’ said the Doctor apologetically. ‘Do you
remember that bit in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy’s house drops out of the
sky into Munchkinland and kills the witch and everybody’s very pleased and
they dance around her singing, telling her exactly how pleased they are with
her?’
She furrowed her brow suspiciously. ‘Hmm. Yes, I do.’
‘Well, it’s a bit like that, really.’
‘We’re in Munchkinland and they’re all delighted to see us?’
‘No. We’re on a hotel on an asteroid and they don’t look that pleased at all.’
There was some commotion then as the large, overbearing manager huffed
and puffed his way through the small crowd of onlookers to take over.
‘So how’s that like The Wizard of Oz, then?’ asked Anji impatiently.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘Sad allusion, anyway. Look, here’s Mr
Brewster.’
The manager was a boar, standing erect on his two hind legs and wearing
a smart uniform adorned with all manner of medals. His humped back stood


18

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

almost as tall as the TARDIS itself and his rancid breath came steaming out
through a snout that quivered and dripped in annoyance.
‘This is them, sir,’ quavered Ellie.
‘I’ll take over from here,’ Mr Brewster grunted. ‘Have security move this box
and fetch the cleaners to scrape up the remains.’
‘That’s the remains of the esteemed Professor Jag,’ the Doctor told Anji helpfully.

‘Oh, great,’ she said.
‘We landed on him.’
‘Can we do that?’ she hissed.
‘That’s what I said,’ Fitz put in.
‘Now that it apparently has happened,’ mused the Doctor, as they were led
off to the manager’s office, ‘It makes me wonder why it hasn’t happened before.
I might have squashed intelligent beings all over the galaxy and never been any
the wiser!’ He shook his head and scratched his beard, which was itching, as if
presciently, alerting him to the fact that something here wasn’t quite right.


Chapter Three
In Reginald Tyler’s head, great age meant an increase in powers, not a decrease.
Not this ailing and failing he was currently experiencing.
Great age ought to have meant being greater and wiser than ever. It should
have been about becoming the one to lead others on a wonderful quest.
Of course, he would let the others do all the running about, and all the
adventurous stuff.
But he would be the wise one they couldn’t afford to be without. He would be
the only one who knew the maps and the territory and where their adventure
was leading them.
He would be there, at the moment of direst peril, ready to step in and confront the omnipotent villain and to beard him in his den.
On the last morning of his very long life, Reg went for a long walk, across
the fields and dells at the back of his and Enid’s bungalow.
He had only ever consented to buy this house because the garden led down
to this small wilderness. He would never have gone to live in suburbia, unless it
still had some vestige of wilderness attached; some unlovable, unkempt space
like this.
As he stumped through the crackling, long, frosted grass, Reg was thinking
that, within a few years, some greedy bastard would undoubtedly have this

wasteground developed and that soon there would be even more bungalows
plonked down here. They would tear down the twisted elms and the stately
ash and they would lay foundations on the Burn, which, that morning, was
moving quite slowly. The shallow water was sheeted and misted with frail ice.
And when they took this small wasteground away, there would be even less
space for dreaming of adventure. There would be one less mysterious place in
the world.
Wood pigeons were bonging out their songs. The bare branches were black
against the morning blue, stark as mascara brushes. He thought of Enid early
this morning, plying the mascara on, seated at her small dressing table in her
towelling dressing robe with the bits coming off. Easing the black paste on to


20

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

invisible eyelashes as she prepared herself for another round of futile socialising.
Reg Tyler mulled over the probable origins of the word ‘mascara’. He loved
the sound of the word, regardless of what it pertained to.
As he left the rough path he was mumbling it to himself, hearing it come out
congested with his head-cold and his pent-up crossness.
How he ached. And he shivered each time he stepped on to a twig or fallen
branch, which cracked and found some sympathy in his own, brittle bones.
What he wanted to become was the mysterious old man who held all the
answers. The one who knew and understood the deep magic underneath the
everyday dross. Who, when the crisis came up, could appear in a flash; in a
long white robe. He would dispense his wisdom gravely. It wouldn’t even have
to be a starring part; just a cameo role, one or two key scenes in the main
action. That’s all he wanted.

But, he knew, there was no adventure that would have him now.
Maybe there never had been.
Maybe there were never any adventures at all.
They were just something that he had made up. Him and all the other
Smudgelings. Maybe it was just as people had said: that they had been silly,
scribbling, over-excited schoolboys, writing schoolboy adventures to amuse
themselves and make themselves feel more adventurous than they actually
were.
No matter how broken down he felt (and just then he felt like the ruined old
deck chairs they had cleared out of the garage when they moved here) Reg still
found that he was restless for riding on horseback into the pale horizon.
He knew that there was still some grand confrontation coming up in the
south. He knew there was some appointment; some appalling denouement
that would require his attention.
Somewhere he had to be.
Sometimes, though, even he had to admit that he got mixed up.
He would forget that the adventures he had had were all inside his head,
while he was sitting at a desk.
But. . . but. . . other people believed in them.
He sat down, on a flat, cold rock beside the cautious stream.
It was like Enid had said, just last night: even her new, superficial friends at
the gaudy Hotel Miramar would talk about the great adventure he was reputed
to be writing. Even they talked about it like something real. Enid thought


Chapter Three

21

they were foolish, but they evidently didn’t. Reg could feel their interest, their

investment, even through the jeering words of his wife.
So many people believing in the world he had invented. . . did that make it
more or less true than it had been to him, through those long years? More true,
surely.
Yet, he felt further away from his invented land now than he had ever felt,
even before beginning the work. It was as if someone had taken his world from
him. . .
Maybe he needed to meet them after all, this curious set of drinking cronies
of his wife’s. Just an hour or so of their company. Let them flatter him and
surround him. What harm could that do to him?
He was watching through the frost-scabbed trees as he thought and he
blinked then, suddenly, jarred out of his reverie and plans.
He thought he had seen a small, undistinguished figure standing there in the
gap, and beckoning to him.
His eyes moistened and blurred as he tried to refocus.
Then the figure was there again.
It waved a small, nervous hand at him and Reg made a choking noise in his
throat.
It’s probably some hooligan. A mugger.
And I’m a silly old fool, he thought, to go tramping out in this wilderness
alone. Anything could become of me. And they would find his skinny old body
lying dead in the beck. . .
But still he sat listening on the flat rock. He listened for the rustle in the grass
as the partly-seen figure darted back into view. It was grinning at him. Yes, he
could make it out much more clearly now.
It was a dog.
Just a dog with searching green eyes and a livid pink tongue, spraying spittle.
Against the white of the undergrowth, its fur was an exotic blue.
It caught Reg’s eye – quite deliberately, it seemed – and then it nodded, with
respect.

Slowly Reg stood up.
‘Here, boy.’
As suddenly as it had arrived, the dog bounded away again, into the forest’s
obscurity.
Only after it had gone and the silence was resumed, did Reg realise that the
dog had been standing on its hind legs. And it had brushed aside the vegetation
with its hands. Its human-like, rather cultured hands.


22

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

It had been exactly like the dogs in his book.
Reg stooped there for a few minutes, holding his breath as his rattled old
heart beat out a merry tattoo.
He was waiting for further signs that he hadn’t lost his mind. He wanted to
know that the creature he had seen had really been there. He was waiting for
the further rustle of frosty grass, proving it true.
He staggered into the beck, breaking open the thin sheeted ice easily, and
splashing the frozen water up his legs. The cold stung him and shocked him,
but he was past feeling that now as he cried out: ‘No, come back! Come back!
I know what you are!’
He was tripping on icy rocks as he cried out and staggered and almost fell,
full length, fatally on the water.
And this was how Reg Tyler is known to have died. He cracked his hip on
those rocks and lay for hours in the icy water and was dead by lunchtime.
That, of course, is the official version of history. A sad loss, a terrible waste,
etc. etc.
But on this occasion, as Reg staggers in the water, the blue dog darts out of

the undergrowth again and, as Reg cries out in pleasure and recognition, the
dog steps into the water to help him. He takes the old man’s flailing hand and
steadies him. The dog licks his hand and the two of them stare at each other.
‘You’re real,’ Reg stammers.
And slowly the two of them start to disappear. The colour drains out of them,
as if frost is slowly coating them. Their outlines blur and eventually, the two of
them are gone.